From the author who brought to you Kansas City 1938, More from 1938 Kansas City, and critically acclaimed Even more of 1938 Kansas City, comes long-awaited:

Still More Photos from  1938 Kansas City

(not available in 3-d)

The truth is, I am lazy, my car is in the shop and I have nothing better to do working tirelessly to entertain you. Some of those might have been used in the previous posts, sorry.

I had to double-check the title to make sure that the word “old-timey” doesn’t have any dirty meaning known only to Chimpo. Seems like I am safe for now but you can’t be too sure with him.

Long time ago, before the word “mail” got itself attached to the letter “e”, people wrote letters and exchanged postcards. Even I was in on the pen pal craze writing a couple of letters in broken English to some unfortunate American girl from Minnesota who wasted her parents’ money on a trip to the Soviet Union. Nowadays the post office is dying a slow death surviving only by delivering junk mail and bills. The email is faster, easer, more convenient and free, but one thing that’s being lost is the appreciation of the distances it travels making our world seem smaller and without borders. When an old card or a letter traveled for weeks crossing many countries and continents , it was an event to open a mailbox to find something touched by your friend or a relative and then be every mail person on the way. Email arrives instantly and no one touches it except the government’s supercomputer which makes sure you are not an evildoer. Many Americans grow up to think that the world looks like this. Many studies have been done to show that Americans can’t find other countries and even their own states on the map even if threatened with waterboarding. I always hated geography myself but I can still point out most countries on the map and even the majority of American states, except the little ones in the East, but they don’t count anyway.
Recently I’ve found an interesting website that preserves or, maybe, even resurrects an old hobby of exchanging postcards. Postcrossing.com has 43,693 members in 178 countries who connect through the website to send and receive postcards to each other. After registration you can initially send up to 5 cards to random members and then become eligible to receive up five cards from others. In the first batch my daughter and I mailed cards to Taiwan, Finland, Australia, Netherlands and Germany for a total of 23,344 miles traveled. Some of these arrived in less than 5days. We received messages from all of the recipients thanking us for the cards. Many people post their cards online and one local girl even made a presentation in her club with cards from around the world.
Hopefully, after some time our map of the world will be filled with cards we mailed. So far it looks like this. Again, like many years ago, I run (OK, walk) to the mailbox to see if there is anything there for me, besides bills and pizza coupons. I like the feeling. Try it for yourself.

If you were stuck in traffic on I-35 Southbound last night it was probably because of this:

The worst thing is that the driver actually made it home the night before, when it actually was slick.

I’ve always wanted to drive along the Pacific Coast. Many times at work I would look at the breathtaking images taken from the California State Route 1 and make a mental note to make it there, so I can add my own photographs to the enormous pile that already exists. So as soon as we got off the train we proceeded to rent a car and spend the next 36 hours exploring the Coast, Monterey, Big Sur an everything in between. We returned the car the 450 miles later, 450 miles of the best-looking scenic drive in the country. Even though we had to hurry through the area pressed by the vacation plans, we weren’t disappointed. We drove through a cloud, ate ice cream in Santa Cruz, spent a night in Monterey where we visited the Cannery Row and the best Aquarium in the country, stopped to take photos of elephant seals and a waterfall. But most of all it was about enjoying the view and loving the ride.

On the unrelated note, cars that don’t use ignition keys are highly overrated and annoying. I hope it’s not a trend.

Every child in Johnson County, KS knows that bus is bad. Our relationship with the bus service ends on the first day we are able to get a driver’s license and our fine-leather-clad feet never step through a bus door again. From there on, our asses are firmly planted in the leather seats of overpriced imported cars which are mandatory in Johnson County. Once in a while we see a bus on a street or a highway and we give its invisible passengers the same look a person gives to a plumber who is about to go elbow-deep into a full toilet bowl. We distrust party buses, avoid shuttles, shun trolleys and only begrudgingly use charter buses but only when no one we know can see us.

All that said, why are we investing over $50 million into improving the bus service?